The pre order price from origin is very hefty. Amazon are doing pre order for £35 (Standard/Limited Edition) at the moment. Game are doing Collectors Edition for £42.99 and Standard/Limited Edition for £35 also. The limited and standard edition are the same price, however the limited edition offers the following: New Characters - Protector of SimCity MaxisMan vs. the evil Dr. Vu and his henchman.Crime Waves - The evil Dr. Vu is loose and will create havoc in your city. Normal police have their hands full against this Super Villain. The evil Dr. Vu will solicit Sims to become his henchmen and carry out his dastardly deeds. Super Hero HQ - Place MaxisMans headquarters in your city to combat crime and keep your Sims safe. Upgrade with the Turbo Machine garage and The Reticulator landing pad.Evil Villain Lair - Place Dr. Vus Lair in your city to unleash a crime wave. As the evil Dr. Vu commits more crimes, upgrade his lair with a special laboratory and a garage for the evil VuMobile.

I'm one of those EA weary curmudgeons who'll probably give this a miss. I don't like the tiny city size or the always online requirement; the second it stops making them shed loads of money EA'll pull the plug on the servers and you'll be left with either a shiny coaster or 4 gig of useless drive space.

Dead Space 3 is a brilliant game but, again, your mileage depends on having played the first two.

Battlefield 3 will guarantee you hours of online shooty shooty (FPS) and is great fun to some but not for others. I will stress that the difference between BF3 and the likes of call of duty etc is that there are vehicles and more of a focus on dropping ammo and stuff for squadmates.

SimCity 4 was more gash than 5.

On topic, though -

Played SC5 over the weekend and was really disappointed. I've played every update and new release since but I will still say that SC3k is the best of the series, even if it offered less. I felt like I could build whatever the **** I wanted in SC3k. My go-to build style was to create a large, sprawling city and a small, farm-dominated village out in the sticks. I really enjoyed watching the city gradually expand out into the farm until it dominated the landscape. Even if that is a bit evil.

SC5 has really let me down. The way you build, the road planning and waterworks are all fairly interesting but they take away the fun of creating individual layers of infrastructure. The game LOOKS good too but the city size is ridiculously small and I constantly feel like the game is building the small town (it's not a city) for me rather than me making the decisions. High land values and a nice forrested region near some housing? Yeah, it's an education sector. I couldn't make anything else. It just guides you through everything without doing it and you feel guilty if you don't go with the flow.

There is no balance between the various areas you build. You just build for the sake of building and you manage peripherals. Again, compare that to SC3k - an aspect the game never teaches you about is demand. You can play with that. Build lots of residential housing and suddenly the need for industry sky-rockets. Build too much industry and then residential demand plummets due to pollution etc. Get the balance right and you need commercial zones so people can spend their money.

SC5 just wants you to build it so that you can get special 'areas' and buildings etc.